ReJesus – Conclusion: Read This Bit Last by Craig Brown

While I am not tasked with writing a blog that draws Frost’s and Hirsch’s work to a close, it is fitting for me to at least reflect on the application they offer in the “Conclusion: Read This Bit Last”.  The fictional conversation between Peter and Paul and the drawn conclusions serve up a few new questions.

I became a Christian at the age of thirteen and began attending a small rural United Methodist Church.  I remember with vivid detail praying and inviting Christ into my life on January 17, 1982.  The prayer, while sincere was profoundly formulaic.  I attended college at a Christian University and majored in Biblical Studies and Theology with a clearly fundamentalist bent.  I remember memorizing the “Four Spiritual Laws” created by Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ.  I likewise remember being trained in the nine domains of systematic theology, street evangelism, apologetics and a variety of other skills requisite to function as a leader in the fundamentalist world.  The only problem was that I was not a fundamentalist.  What it afforded me was insight into how that part of the Christian world functions.  Frost and Hirsch are part of a group of “de-toxing” fundamentalists searching for a new vision of what the church is.  The essence of this church is relational and missional.

On the other hand, I also have a strange third person relationship with United Methodism which, for some strange reason, has an aversion to talking too much about Jesus.  There were many times I would sit at Annual Conference both in plenaries and in worship before being ordained and questioned why I seldom heard the “J” word.  In the late 80’s we seemed enamored with new names and images for God but Jesus was mentioned little.  In the 90s we struggled to redefine our mission on the cusp of the 21^st century with little acknowledgement of Jesus at all (anyone remember Vision 2000?).  Now we are beginning to engage in a process of “jones-ing” up to Jesus.  It is a welcome return to becoming a church that is relational and missional.

While Hirsch and Frost actually ask an old question, “What would happen if we went back to being the church of the first century?” there is nothing at all wrong with asking it!  In my opinion, we live in a fascinating age in which two seemingly segmented arms of Christianity are beginning to ask the most fundamental question, “What does Jesus have to do with who we have become?”  Having had feet in two theological worlds, I am finding joy in observing these two polarities of the church asking the same question!  Every movement, as it ages, must ask this question of what to do with Jesus?  Both fundamentalist Christianity and mainline liberal Christianity are approaching an intersection around this question.  It only seems appropriate as they are both beginning to show their relative age!

If we are serious about this question of what to do with Jesus, then these new questions being raised in the conclusion bear asking as well:

Will we engage in assessing all we do in light of Jesus’ life and ministry?

Will we be honest about the authentic call to faithful discipleship and eschew the milquetoast commitment many of us express toward Jesus?

Will we become leaders that model and create authentic Christian community instead of telling others what it should be like?

Will we allow the Holy Spirit to be our guide and leader rather than our own machinations of strategy and vision?  (More importantly, do we have the spiritual skill set to allow that to happen?)

Will we be simply parochial or will become pastoral in temperament and mission?

Will we stand for maintenance or mission?

-Rev. Criag Brown is the pastor at San Diego First UMC

ReJesus-- Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch - Chapter 7 by Rev Brian Parcel

Jesus' Community:

        will follow the example of Jesus

        will equip all followers

        will move outward to serve others

        understands that worship is a whole-of-life exaltation of Jesus

        practices the presence of Jesus

        insists that we need to be continually re-evangelized

        learns and lives the values of Jesus

        devotes itself to scripture and the exercise of spiritual gifts

Sound refreshing?  Compelling?  Good News?  Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch assert that this description of Jesus' Community in fact is THE Good News, gleaned right from their reading of the Gospels.  They claim this kind of community would develop naturally from people who followed the example and teaching of Jesus and left behind dry, obsolete and hardened rituals and ways of the church. 

I must admit, some of the language of Re-Jesus smells of the the all too familiar "right" reading of the Biblical text and "right" theological view that is espoused all too frequently in the Christian church.  I do find it quite ironic that almost all the 'little Jesus'' that are highlighted within Re-Jesus are people who were formed by the very church of ritual and domestication that the authors are proclaiming needs reformation.  Despite these reservations I cannot help but to be drawn to the list above.

That is the life I want, I want it for my kids, I want it for my church, I want it for the community I am called to serve as a pastor.  I find the reminder that Hirsch and Frost are giving to us refreshing and necessary.  It is good to rethink Jesus considering where we have added our baggage to the seminal character of all history.  It is a must from time to time for all of us, individuals and the Church to step back and inspect where we have read our lives into the story of Jesus and covered the values of God evident in the life of Jesus with our own.

Whenever I do this, including now as I read this book, I am reminded of the same scathing critique of the Church -- the Church never seems to get it right.  The Church has always insisted, throughout history, for orthodoxy that does not necessarily conform to Christ but always conforms to the Church.  I think though, in my own life and ministry, I have become bored with this realization, argument and critique.  Of course the Church never gets it right because the Church by nature is an organization and the primary purpose of every organization must be to preserve the organization at all costs.  The argument then always turns to a movement versus an organization, but this does not work all that well either because every movement that has legs and lasting power must also organize itself for the good work it is about and thus another organization is born.  So, an organization is bound to fall short and a movement (at least one worth joining) is bound to turn into an organization......so what's left?

In the moments of life (brief as they may be) that I align my life....my ministry......my discipleship with Jesus I am reminded of the same simple truth -- Jesus always cared for the next individual in his path, and then the next, and then the next.  I have come to believe that the only part of Christianity that can truly be Christ like on a regular basis is the individual disciple of Jesus Christ.  Yes they are moments when we get it right as a team or a church or The Church, but those are moments, fleeting at best.  But an individual, that is a different story.  As a local church pastor I am always looking for signs of the real Jesus and seeking the continuation of the redemption story we find in the meta narrative of scripture.  Most often i don't find it in the work of the organized Church, rather I find it in the lives of the individual disciples who make up the church. 

I see individuals develop relationships with others who are inexplicably different in every way and yet a bond is grown that mirrors the sacrificial living for others of which Jesus was so good.        

I see individuals who give of their time, talent, finances and so much more in a way that it is clear they don't just understand but are living the Jesus lesson about heart and treasure.

I see individuals exhibit a grace to others, that I can only hope to attain someday, and yet I know this grace ought to be the striving of my life because this is the grace of which Jesus taught and with which he lived.

I was just reflecting the other day amidst an All Saints Service how fortunate and blessed I was to have known the stories of the people who's names were being read amidst this annual ritual of the church.  To some in the room they were the beloved and to others they were just a name in print but as the pastor I had a special view into their lives.  In the same way I count it a great blessing that I get to hear and experience the behind the scenes stories of how individuals in my congregation became little Jesus' for a moment in their lives.  The Church rarely seems to accomplish this incarnational nature, but the people of the church so often surprise me in the ways they become God incarnate for the other.  So while I share the angst of Frost and Hirsch over the state of the Church I am also humbled to see the many individuals who make up the Church living in real, relevant and powerful ways that bring the reality of Jesus to fruition in the lives of so many.  In the end I cannot help but to find hope.

-- Rev. Dr. Brian T. Parcel is a husband, father and Elder in the United Methodist Church and a graduate of the Claremont School of Theology (M.Div, D.Min, 2002).  Over the past 14 years he has served as Lead Pastor of three congregations in the California Pacific Conference, all three having experienced multiple factors of growth under his leadership.    He has also provided leadership for clergy training opportunities through the Board of Congregational Development and the Board of Ordained Ministry.   

Chapter 6 ReJesus Book Study by Rev. Lynn Munson

Sign holders at stadiums and on street corners, tracts handed out door to door, conversations and conflicts in our churches; all cause me a bit of dis-ease. Each reducing Christianity to a set of rules, a code of ethics, and a three-point prayer that will swing wide the gates of heaven; only for the few.  And somehow it makes me uncomfortable. In fact, it feels to me as if there is an anger and a coercion behind the proclamation. If you don’t do this…you won’t get that….and in fact you’ll get something worse. Eternal damnation…if you don’t believe exactly what I say. Did God really leave it in our hands to believe exactly the right thing; when He knows how we humans have been getting it wrong from the beginning?

I think of my daughter when she was about two. She always wanted to be near me when I was cooking. I’d open the stove, and there she was. I’d be stirring something over a burner and she wanted me to hold her. Every time...wanting to reach out and touch the hot surface or the flame. Until, one day, she saw me burn my finger, “ouch!” She witnessed me cry out and shake my hand, and pull away. After that, when we were near the oven or the stove top, she would gesture toward it and say, “owie” and pull away. The way she saw me react to the burn, she re-enacted. She followed.

For me, this is a helpful epiphany found in our chapter’s discussion on the dichotomy of Hellenistic and Hebraic worldviews. I’ve not thought about it before, that Hellenism would direct us toward a Christian Ideology; a system of ideas or ideals. And yet, authors, Frost and Hirsh invite us to consider that no person, much less, no Messiah can be reduced to an idea…or an ideal. And rather than someone to believe…as we would an idea. Jesus is someone to follow.

Additionally, the point of faith changes when not trying to labor over right-thinking; where the goal seems to be, that if we could just get the right read on scripture we’d find the fast track to holiness. Rather, if the point is, as Kierkegaard encourages, to “let the text read us,” then it is only in following Jesus’ way with us that holiness can be found.

This too, is uncomfortable. Because, I cannot control what Jesus might read in me. And I cannot control where He might lead me…or how He might lead me to change…or to do something I don’t want to do. He might even call me to love and have grace with those sign holders at stadiums and on the corner. He might bid me to welcome the tract distributors. And He might even push me into the center of those church chats to be present as He is present.

What does the Word find when it reads you (and me)?

How do we uncover our own preconceived ideas of who God is and how He responds in the world?

Rev Lynn Munson is the Senior Pastor at Yorba Linda UMC. 

Chapter 4 ReJesus Blog by Rev. Gary Bernard Williams

I thought I was finally well equipped to be the father I had always wanted to be with my youngest child Nicole. I had already walked through many life challenges of my own and thought to myself this time things will be different with this child. My other two children were raised without any input from me as their father and they had entered their young adult years with thanks to their wonderful mothers who raised them without me. Now I had a chance to have input in my third child’s life how hard could it be to raise one child with a wonderful wife that I loved with all my heart. The one thing I didn’t anticipate was the level of anxiety in “getting it right this time.” It created in me a fear that caused me to want total control over this child driving me to a place of near desperation that this little girl would become the person I envisioned her to be. I wanted to mold her into the image in my mind and my heart. There was nothing wrong with the image I had created for my daughter; it just wasn’t an image that I had allowed her to mold through a personal relationship with Christ. I was not very open to her individuality; an expression of God’s working in her life. I wanted her to be polite, caring, compassionate, but it was my perception of those qualities that I wanted her to conform to rather than allowing her to discover her own character and allow God to shape that through the ups and downs of her life. Most importantly, I wanted to “domesticate” her so my life would be comfortable.

Unfortunately, the more I struggled to mold her to my image of the ideal daughter, the more challenges I faced in truly building a loving, caring relationship where we both could reach out and draw closer to one another. In order for her to become her own person, she felt the need to break away because she felt threatened by the walls I built. Those walls discouraged her from becoming too connected to me as her father because of my need to control, mold, and shape her life. I finally came to the realization that I did not have ownership over my child that God had so graciously brought into my life. She was a gift, and my responsibility was to care for that gift in a way that allowed her to grow and find Christ in her own life, allowing God to mold her into his image. I needed to see her as someone formed by God. I haven’t by any stretch of the imagination reached that place of perfection in my relationship with my now young adult daughter. I have, however, begun the process, and our conversations have taken on a new direction that has brought us into a much better relationship where we have much more open communication and respect. I am allowing myself to see my daughter for who she is and to appreciate the woman she is becoming.

 Do we have the tendency of creating an image of Jesus in the same way? Is it our desire to shape Jesus into our own image? Do we try to domesticate Jesus to avoid seeing the real God-Man the real “Wild Messiah”? I believe we do, and in the attempt to domesticate him, we are tempted to understand him in light of what we already believe about the world through the lens of culture, race, and ethnicity. We try to place him in familiar categories; we want to have some natural, comfortable understanding of who he is. The tendency is to make him into something we might expect, what he would be like if he were our creation. In that process of re-imaging Jesus so he makes sense to us, we reduce him to the commonplace. Once we have finished our re-imaging, we can be comfortable with our lives because he will pose no threat to our complacency. “The benign images of gentle Jesus, meek and mild, have comforted and encouraged many believers” (p. 87).

In order to domesticate Jesus we also take his sayings and reconstruct them to fit our image of who he is. When Jesus says “Anyone who does not give up all that he has cannot be my disciple,” or when he says “When you give a feast, do not invite your friends and relatives, lest they repay you. Instead invite the poor, the lame, the blind, the maimed,” or “do not lay up for yourselves treasure on earth,” we find it difficult to believe that we are asked to accept these sayings literally. So our tendency is to reconstruct his sayings in a way that feels more comfortable. What we have left is not true revelation. We remove ourselves from the necessity of allowing the Holy Spirit to speak into our lives in providing for us an understanding of the hard sayings of Jesus. We are easily persuaded that the life Jesus calls us to does not require our total surrender.

Our focus has been on Jesus calling us to a change in behavior, when in reality Jesus is calling us to character transformation and a changing of our hearts. We have attempted to domesticate Jesus in a way that allows us to simply express love in good deeds, but often that love doesn’t automatically come from a heart that’s focused on Christ. We have changed our behavior, but not our heart condition. Jesus didn’t die on the cross to provide self-improvement tips for better living he died on the cross to provide a way for us to be reconciled to God, and in that reconciliation, to be transformed to God’s image. We don’t always fully understand what Jesus meant when he spoke of peace, love, and doing good. It isn’t about feelings, or being nice, or tolerating others, although those are good and honorable things. It is about conforming our will to God’s will that is the only way the Church will become the “Living Body of Christ” we are called to transform the world and to present the real Jesus the “Wild Messiah” Jesus!

As I read this book I realized that I have re-imagined Jesus to be friendly and caring the kind of person I feel comfortable in befriending. Just as the Roman soldiers stripped Jesus of his clothing and placed on him one of their own military cloaks, I too have had the tendency to put on Jesus my own kind of clothes. “One of the best ways to expose our co-option of Jesus to our own personal, religious, and cultural agendas is to interpret the many images of him that we entertain” (p. 92). Can you see how our understanding of Jesus can be so easily shaped by who we are? We shape Jesus into our image through our personal reality our own needs, wants and desires. “One of the best ways to expose our co-option of Jesus to our own personal, religious, and cultural agendas is to interpret the many images of him that we entertain.”  (p. 92).

“Our point is that to reJesus the church, we need to go back to the daring, radical, strange, wonderful, inexplicable, unstoppable, marvelous, unsettling, disturbing, caring, powerful God-Man. The communities around us are crying out for him” (p. 111). Without a true understanding of Christ’s character can we find a way to really be the Church? When we distort Jesus in order to re-imagine him to fit our needs and desires, we effectively deny ourselves the opportunity to be bold proclaimers of the Gospel we claim to love so much. Our re-imagining of Jesus may provide us some comfort in the world, but we have robbed ourselves of the transforming power that can only be found in a “Wild Messiah”. It is when we see Jesus truly as he is that we receive the power to be all God calls us to be. “The church needs to find itself in league with this Jesus, staring at him in amazement and saying, as Peter did, with trembling voice, ‘What kind of man is this?’ Even the wind and waves obey him. Even wild demons obey him. Even the Pharisees quake at the thought of what he might unleash if left to his own devices’ (p.111). We need to go back to the authentic Jesus of the New Testament, whether or not that fits our re-structured image of his character and mission. For we are told in 1 Corinthians 8:6 that there is only “one Lord, Jesus Christ.” When we take Jesus out of his original context we begin to manipulate and domesticate him in such a way that what we present to the world is a caricature of him rather than a true portrait.

Questions for reflection:  What is it about your Jesus that you are trying to imitate? In what ways have we framed Jesus according to the parts of Him that appeal to us? What would our witness as the church be like if we stopped trying to shape Jesus into to our image?  

                                          Rev. Gary Bernard Williams is the pastor at Faith UMC and Hamilton UMC